Fifteen years of research on payments for ecosystem services (PES): Piercing the bubble of success as defined by a Northern-driven agenda

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have gained widespread prominence as a flagship solution for ecological challenges and attracts multi-billion-dollar annual investments. This large-scale meta-analysis analyzes the epistemic, methodological, and ethical-political assumptions of over 1,000 peer-reviewed articles on PES from 2005 to 2019. Results highlight that effectiveness of PES outcomes, design of PES policy, and market-based valuation of ecosystem services serve as predominant thematic focus areas for research. Considerations such as gender equality, power asymmetries, and the recognition of multiple relational values around human-nature interactions in PES, have received much less attention. Despite research recommendations from the literature emphasizing the need for greater social contextualization in future PES research, much of the literature remains decontextualized from political histories of the territory shaping local social and ecological relations. Results also demonstrate a clear presence of Global North institutions dominating where the scientific expertise on PES is assembled (representing 73% of studies), while 81% of studies collect their empirical data in the Global South. This asymmetry in where knowledge gets generated and extracted is mirrored by methodological homogeneity that risks reproducing a colonial bias of remote and universal expertise. The analysis also demonstrates the extent to which PES gets hyped as a proposed solution to ecological challenges often without any credible evidence. Decontextualized speculation around success, research that 'helicopters' into locations to introduce and make PES fit for purpose, and the highly asymmetrical control of the PES research agenda between Global North and South risks worsening social and ecological crises on the ground.